Asteroid Data Hunter

Protecting the Earth from the threat of asteroid impacts means first knowing where they are. NASA & Planetary Resources are harnessing the incredible potential of innovators, makers and citizen scientists by opening up the search. In an increasingly connected world, NASA recognizes the value of the public as a partner in addressing some of the country‚Äôs most pressing challenges. We need your help in identifying asteroids – and to help further this effort, we‚Äôve built an application that enables everyone, everywhere, to help solve this global challenge.
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This page contains an overview of the challenge and the high level requirements.

Select any of the contests to dive deeper and view the individual contest requirements, from UI design to software development.

Projects are broken-down by the community into atomized pieces of work that comprise the entire build. By launching a series of competitions that make up the whole project, hyper-specialists from within our community register, compete, and submit solutions for each piece.

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Download the App

The app is currently available for download for Windows (7.1+) and Mac (10.10.X+) users. A Linux Ubuntu version is coming very soon. To download the app, please view below:

Who Should Download The App?

Currently, the app is targeted towards hobbyist and amateur astronomers who have their own telescopes.

Does The App Include Sample Images To Search Against?

The app does not come pre-bundled with test images, or the ability to download sample images – if you have access to a telescope and can take photos of the sky, you can upload these photos as long as they are in .FITS format. To view a sample set of test images, or to view the .FITS file format example, please click here to download the sample images.

How Do I Get Started?

Download the User Guide, and learn how to install, launch and upload images into the app

Download sample images that you can use within the app for to test how it works.

Download an installer to help install the app on your Windows or Mac computer. Click here for Windows, and click here for Mac.

What Do I Do If I Have Any Questions Or Find Bugs?

Grab The Source Code From GitHub

The app falls under an Apache license, and is open source – so please feel free to download the source code, tinker and modify the app or algorithm as you see fit. To download the source code from GitHub, please click here.

About The App

Using the latest developments in machine learning algorithms, we have developed an algorithm that is capable of utilizing imagery data from modern telescopes to find more asteroids than has previously ever been possible.

This new method is approximately 15% better than the current method of identifying asteroids in the main belt (Asteroids that orbit between Mars & Jupiter).

The algorithm is capable of running on a common laptop/desktop. Algorithms like these will be used on future spacecraft to identify asteroids to maximize the capability of missions in the future.

The application contains a user interface that anyone can use without too much of a learning curve for new users. It‚Äôs also easy to install and comes with a one-click installation process (no configuration necessary!). For the expert user, full documentation and source code are available for modifications and tweaking.

Project Background

Asteroids pose both a possible threat and an opportunity for Earth: they could impact us, causing damage, OR possibly be mined for resources that could help extend our ability to explore the universe.

Since 1998 NASA has led the global search for Near Earth Objects (NEOs) through its Near Earth Object Observation Program. NASA has also led the federal government in researching how crowdsourcing can help solve tough problems through efforts like the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) supported through a contract with Harvard University and topcoder.

This fits in perfectly with Planetary Resources‚Äô mission, which is to harness the resources in NEOs to extend humanity‚Äôs economic sphere of influence into the Solar System ‚Äď so naturally, a non-exclusive partnership between Planetary Resources and NASA was developed with the goal of working together to improve asteroid detection by using crowd sourced algorithms.

Project Details

How Does Asteroid Detection Currently Work?

Scientists find asteroids by taking images of the same place in the sky and find the starlike objects that move. With many telescopes scanning the sky during the time around the new moon, the large data volumes prevent individual inspection of every image. Traditionally, the identification of asteroids and other moving bodies in the Solar System has been achieved by acquiring images over several epochs and detecting changes between frames. This general approach has been used since before the discovery of Pluto and continues to this day.

Why Did We Launch The ADH Challenge?

With the vast amount of data available now flowing from modern instruments, there is no good way for professional astronomers to verify every detection. In particular, looking in the future as large surveys grow ever larger, the ability to autonomously and rapidly check the images and determine which objects are suitable for follow up will be crucial. There is a long history to adapting programs to find these moving objects with some improvements along the way. For example, the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) uses a crowded field galaxy photometry program (Source Extractor) that identifies centroids of targets that are distinctly separate from other objects. This output is fed into a custom program that sees which sources move. However, analysis implies that at best the CSS data pipeline is 80 ‚Äď 90% accurate and there are (based on CSS discovery numbers) several thousand additional objects that could be recovered per year. Starting from a fresh position allows specific optimizations of data analysis, which would be useful as a general moving object pipeline system for other observatories as well.

Project Personnel

Chris Lewicki
President & Chief Asteroid Miner
Planetary Resources

Mr. Lewicki has been intimately involved with the lifecycle of NASA‚Äôs Mars Exploration Rovers and the Phoenix Mars Lander. Lewicki performed system engineering development and participated in Show more

assembly, test and launch operations for both Mars missions. He was Flight Director for the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and the Surface Mission Manager for Phoenix. The recipient of two NASA Exceptional Achievement Medals, Lewicki has an asteroid named in his honor: 13609 Lewicki. Chris holds bachelor‚Äôs and master‚Äôs degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Arizona. At Planetary Resources, Mr. Lewicki is responsible for the strategic development of the company‚Äôs mission and vision, engagement with customers and the scientific community, serves as technical compass, and leads day to day operations.

Dr. Matthew Beasley is a core team member at Planetary Resources, Inc. He completed a Ph.D. in Astrophysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was the Principal Investigator of the University of Colorado ultraviolet sounding rocket program and oversaw six Show more

launches that resulted in two Ph.D.‚Äôs and several scientific publications. In addition to his sub-orbital experience he was part of the instrument team for the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (currently installed on the Hubble Space Telescope). He moved to Planetary Resources in 2012 and there has spent his time designing optical instrumentation for attitude control, laser communication, and asteroid evaluation

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Karim R. Lakhani
Lumry Family Associate Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Principal Investigator, Harvard-NASA Tournament Lab at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

Karim R. Lakhani is the Lumry Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and the Principal Investigator of the Harvard-NASA Tournament Lab at the Institute for Quantitative Show more

Social Science. He specializes in the management of technological innovation in firms and communities. His research is on distributed innovation systems and the movement of innovative activity to the edges of organizations and into communities. He has extensively studied the emergence of open source software communities and their unique innovation and product development strategies. He has also investigated how critical knowledge from outside of the organization can be accessed through innovation contests. Currently Professor Lakhani is investigating incentives and behavior in contests and the mechanisms behind scientific team formation through field experiments on the topcoder platform and the Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Rinat Sergeev is a Data Scientist at the Harvard-NASA Tournament Lab (NTL). Rinat works as a lead science and technical expert on exploring and utilizing crowdsourcing approaches in application to Big Data challenges,Show more

faced by NASA and Government. In his role, Rinat provides full guidance and support on all aspects of the project from problem definition/formulation, to resolving all issues through execution, working closely with all parties involved. Rinat received his PhD in Physics of Semiconductors in Ioffe Institute, Saint Petersburg. Following his innate curiosity, he pursued challenges in a variety of academic fields, from Quantum-Mechanical Processes to Immunology and Epidemiology. His research interests include conceptual analysis, analytical approaches and models in multiple areas. Currently, Rinat is a growing specialist of machine-learning algorithms and algorithmic challenges. His personal interests include Math puzzles, strategic games and politics.

As Director for the Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) Division with the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD) at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Jason Crusan is the senior executive, manager, principle advisor and advocate on technology Show more

and innovation approaches leading to new flight and system capabilities for human exploration. He serves as the AES Senior Manager, leading the 500-600 Civil Servants with an active portfolio of 20-30 engineering and design projects. He leads integration with the Space Technology Mission Directorate and the other HEOMD programs such as the International Space Station and the Exploration System Division Programs. Crusan holds Bachelor‚Äôs Degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics, a Master‚Äôs in Computer Information Systems, and is currently a candidate for a Ph.D. in Engineering Management at George Washington University. Mr. Crusan is married and has two children.

Dr. Tim Spahr has been studying asteroids and comets since the early 1990s, and his personal interest in these objects started 15 years before that. Spahr is the Director of the International Astronomical Union Minor Show more

Planet Center, operated at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The MPC is the world’s nerve center for asteroid and comet observations. Prior to his work at the MPC, Spahr was a member of the original Catalina Sky Survey team during 1998-2000, where he wrote software to detect moving objects in CCD frames, as well as measure their positions precisely. Tim’s dissertation research was completed at the University of Florida studying celestial mechanics and observational biases present in asteroid surveys.

Victoria Pidgeon Friedensen is a member of the Advanced Exploration Systems Division at NASA HQ and leads the Robotic Precursor Activities domain: a diverse portfolio of flight system and instrument development Show more

projects, research and analysis efforts, and mission concept studies that provide critical data to inform system and mission design to directly enable NASA‚Äôs human exploration program. Ms Friedensen‚Äôs last robotic mission, LCROSS, verified that there is water on the Moon, for which she received a NASA Exceptional Service award. In addition to flight project management, Ms. Friedensen specializes in risk management and social policy. As an anthropologist specializing in culture and risk perception, Ms. Friedensen‚Äôs work focuses on the interface between technology and society by understanding social acceptance of technologies and risk. She brings expertise in public perception of risk to the Asteroid Data Hunter project. Ms. Friedensen was born in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and calls herself a ‚ÄėNASA-brat‚Äô. She holds degrees in anthropology and science and technology policy.